Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

isked eviction as Departmental agents warned against overcrowding and 'unsuitable' visitors.
I am horrified and ashamed to read the machinations of this pitiless system. I am ashamed to know that
many families with large bank accounts had to go cap in hand to ask permission to make small
withdrawals, permission that was frequently refused. Shame turned to disgust now I know that the
government knew of, was consistently warned of widespread frauds by both employers and police, but
always refused to implement the simplest check namely that people see some record of what was being
done to their own savings. Disgust turned to anger now I know that the government itself was taking
money from savings for trust accounts it misused and purloined, it engineered 'consent' for deductions
to pay for improvements on Departmental reserves, it seized the bank interest and, in the late 1950s, it
simply wrote itself a regulation so it could invest hundreds of thousands of pounds of those savings in
development projects of regional hospitals when Aboriginal patients were dying of cross infections in
the under-resourced and inadequately staffed equivalents.
I am horrified and ashamed to have lived oblivious to such calculated inhumanity. I am also
diminished. My sense of myself as a member of a just society is fractured as surely as if I had stepped
on a landmine. I am horrified at how late it was in life that I came to learn the terrible realities endured
by Aboriginal families at the hands of governments. And this knowledge is very confronting: because
I'm one of the millions of Australians who have never gone hungry, I have never been cast adrift from
my family, I have always had a roof over my head, a warm bed, my wages in my hand to spend on my
needs.
It's not just a case of 'adding in' this untold history. This evidence cannot be characterised as a few
awkward last pieces to be fitted in to an almost-completed national jigsaw as our Prime Minister seems
to suggest. This is not simply a matter of adjusting the colour and contrast of a two-dimensional
representation of our 'development' from the primitive to the modern. What this evidence reveals is a
submerged operational dynamic within our national psyche. The diminishment and degradation of
Aboriginal agency in Australian history is the diminishment and degradation of us all. Knowing only
part of our history, our identity is open to manipulation and distortion. If we could embrace the true
content and outcomes of government management of Aboriginal lives, much of the 'whiteness' of our
identity would be replaced by the multi-colours of reality. White explorers did not, like conquering
heroes, 'open up' the outback and pave the way for 'civilisation'; they were watched, guided and often
rescued by those whose country it was, those who knew it infinitely better, those who moved and
endured lightly on the landscape. White miners, stockmen and settlers did not 'pioneer' life in the bush;
most remote properties and towns were dependent on the labour of thousands of Aboriginal men,
women and children, with more than 1000 working full time by 1880 in Queensland alone. Time and
time again in the twentieth century pastoralists stated they could not survive without cheap black
labour.
These facts are indicative of more than history untold; they also represent debts unpaid. Debts of
acknowledgment, debts of regret and, in practical, accountable terms, financial debts. In Queensland
alone, calculations show that Aboriginal labour, unpaid and underpaid in the pastoral industry and in
developing the communities, is more than a billion dollars in today's value - calculating only from the
1940s. In Queensland today the state admits it has profited from this forced labour; but while this profit
amounted to around half a million dollars annually the state is currently offering about $55 million, 'in
the spirit of reconciliation' as they put it, 'so we can move on.' That's $4000 for some workers and half
that for others. For decades of work.
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